Kate Woolever Martinez, an art teacher at Saint Paul Preparatory School, 380 Jackson Street, talks to Phoebe Wahlberg about the proportions of a winter boot she is drawing in an observational drawing class Friday January 31, 2014. Her travels to Bangladesh last year led to an art project in her class in which her students draw and paint portraits of children living in the slum. The portraits will be mailed off to Bangladesh. In the background are Bangladeshi children who were painted. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)

Bangalore art

Bangalore art

Portrait of a girl from the from the Jaago Foundation school outside Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh, by St. Paul Preparatory School student Phoebe Wahlberg. Students at the school created the portraits for a drawing and painting assignment drawing attention to climate change. (courtesy St. Paul Preparatory School)

Snapshot of a girl from the from the Jaago Foundation school outside Dhaka, the capitol of Bangladesh, for a portrait created by St. Paul Preparatory School student Phoebe Wahlberg.

A St. Paul teacher is using art to connect her students to the effects of global climate change.

Kate Woolever Martinez, a teacher at the private St. Paul Preparatory School in downtown St. Paul, visited Bangladesh on a cultural exchange program last year and brought her experience into the classroom, turning a routine portrait assignment into a lesson about climate refugees and a Bangladesh school that’s trying to improve the lives of families living in a slum.

During winter break in 2012-13, Woolever Martinez traveled to Bangladesh on an exchange program with the Minneapolis-based group World Savvy along with four other teachers and 30 high school students from California, New York and Minnesota. They spent a month living with host families and learning about how the country is coping with rising sea levels and worsening monsoons.

“We’re saying, ‘Poor them,’ ” Woolever Martinez said. “But in no time, it’s going to be us trying to learn how to survive this climate change. Bangladesh wins the gold medal for resiliency.”

Climate scientists see Bangladesh as ground zero for the effects of global warming. The south Asian country lies in the delta of three rivers and most of the land sits less than 20 feet above sea level. By the end of this century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a quarter of the country will be underwater.

Woolever Martinez and the students on the exchange visited a slum outside the capital city of Dhaka called Rayer Bazar. The shantytown is home to thousands of former farmers and fishermen who have been migrating to the city as their homes or livelihoods disappear. With a translator and camera, Woolever Martinez wandered the streets and interviewed people.

“Every single person I spoke to was a climate refugee,” Woolever Martinez said. “I didn’t know what to expect, but it was really extreme. Droughts or floods or rising sea levels, something had destroyed their crops or fishing areas.”

“They don’t call themselves climate refugees,” she added. “They don’t know what that means. But they could tell me that their land was flooded or that their fields turned salty.”

Woolever Martinez graduated from Augsburg College in 2010 and is no stranger to travel. She studied abroad in Namibia and South Africa, where she also taught art and English to students orphaned by HIV/AIDS. She has traveled to Ecuador and Mexico and taught in Thailand, at South High School in Minneapolis and in Ghana before landing a job as an art teacher three years ago at the private St. Paul school.

“I’ve traveled all over the world, and this was the most extreme poverty I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said. Men in the Rayer Bazar slum work as rickshaw drivers and women work in garment factories, if they are lucky enough to find jobs. There is one toilet for every 100 people, she said. Crime and drugs are big problems.

“There would be five people living in a room not much bigger than the size of a full bed,” Woolever Martinez said. “I know this because I would have to slide into the room sideways between the bed and the wall.”

During monsoons, the stagnant and polluted waters rise to bed height.

Woolever Martinez and the exchange students slept on the floor of the slum’s only school, a free English program run by the Jaago Foundation that serves more than 500 children. It was started in 2007 by a young Bangladeshi named Korvi Rakshand.

“I guarantee he’ll get a Nobel Prize,” is how Woolever Martinez described him. “He gave up his good life and his home in Dkaka and now he lives right by the school.”

When Woolever Martinez returned to Minnesota, she was eager to incorporate her experience into her classroom. She emailed the Jaago school and asked for photographs of the Bangladeshi students. When a stack arrived four months later, she assigned each of her high school art students the task of creating a drawing or painting from one of the photographs.

The majority of students at St. Paul Preparatory are foreign exchange students from countries like China and Brazil, sent by their families to the United States to learn English (it was formerly Nacel International School). Woolever Martinez’s portrait unit put a face to global inequalities and climate change.

“I can’t imagine living in that poverty,” said Virginia Ventrucci, a senior from Italy, who drew a pencil drawing of a Bangladeshi girl in a white, collared school uniform blouse and a brilliant, mischievous smile.

“I choose her because I liked her smile,” Ventrucci said. Like the other high school artists, Ventrucci put a lot of effort into her drawing.

“I loved this project,” Ventrucci said. “You could really see it matters. It was to improve yourself, and your drawing, but it was also to improve a kid’s day.”

Senior Phoebe Wahlberg, one of the few students at St. Paul Preparatory School who is from Minnesota, did a watercolor pencil portrait of a shy-looking girl with long black braids.

“I felt just by looking at her picture that I saw a bit of myself in her,” Wahlberg said. She also wrote a letter to the anonymous Bangladeshi girl that includes a doodle of a snowman and the explanation “This is a snowman, we make them with snow and branches.”

Woolever Martinez laminated the 30 portraits and letters — so they don’t get waterlogged in the monsoons — and plans to mail them to Bangladesh where she hopes they will be a welcome gift.

“The kids there have nothing,” Woolever Martinez said. “No art on the walls. The fact that someone sat down to look on their face — to tell them they matter — that’s huge.”

Maja Beckstrom covers nonprofit organizations for the Pioneer Press. She was hired as a religion reporter, spent a few years covering poverty, and recently wrote her last Pioneer Press Family Outings column,because her teenager started complaining about hanging out with her. She’s won awards, including a Premack for her year-long series about a grandmother and four children struggling through the aftermath of a domestic violence homicide. She has also swung on a trapeze in the name of journalism.

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